Friday, April 16, 2010

sneakin' around

Maybe I haven't been the most vocal supporter of the Splinter Cell franchise, but I've certainly been a fan throughout the entire run; the series peak, Chaos Theory, is one of my favorite games on the original Xbox. I never had cause to bitch about the trial-and-error gameplay; that's what most games are, anyway, and it left my graphics whore needs more than satisfied. But I'll admit that in the time it's taken for this new game to come out, I'd pretty much moved on; I wasn't really all that excited about the first game on the 360, and the tales of development hell that abounded on this new title didn't exactly whet my appetite.

So, well, yeah. I'm a few missions in on Splinter Cell: Conviction and I kinda don't really give a shit. They've taken great pains to make the game more accessible - indeed, it's taken the right design choices from Batman:AA - but it's also made the game frightfully ridiculous. 2 missions in, you're breaking out of a private airfield and you're getting swarmed by, like 10 (incredibly chatty) dudes, with almost no shadows to duck into; I kept dying, repeatedly, and eventually found success simply by running straight through and making it to the next save point. Which is, as I said, ridiculous.

I will endeavor to finish it over the weekend, but it's not, like, burning a hole in my to-do list. Which is a little sad, I guess. I never thought I'd be so apathetic towards Sam Fisher and his fabulous lighting engine.